


Pulling Rank

by 2x2verse (agent_florida)



Series: droneverse [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dirty Talk, Emotional Sex, M/M, Vaginal Sex, debriefing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 14:56:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8165879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent_florida/pseuds/2x2verse
Summary: “You never half-ass anything, you always throw yourself into it, and. You focus on people. And when you focus on me, god, Karkat, I feel like I could fly. You believe in things, okay, you believe in people, and knowing you believe in me? I never want to let you down.”--After the Eridan session, Karkat and John have a thorough debriefing.





	

“Hey,” John says into the hush of the living room, arm around your shoulder and thumb running up and down the back of your arm. The two of you haven’t started the movie yet, mostly because you’re waiting on those two vain screechbirds to pry themselves away from a mirror and out of the bathroom to join you. “You’re kind of quiet. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Nobody safeworded out and you’re _fine_. You are so aggressively fine that you trap John’s hand on your bicep by curling your off arm around your chest so you can cage it in your fingers, press closer to him so you can bury your face in his shirt. He does the laundry. Your clothes always smell like him. Even though you both took a bit of a rinse-off, though, he reeks of sex under the starch-clean of his shirt.

John welcomes the contact, bringing his other hand up to rest it heavy on your head. He never seems to care about your horns, and you don’t know if that’s good or bad, because while he’s trying to pet at you, he keeps nudging them in weird ways that make your spine do a thing. “You’re so tense, though. Are you sure?”

You mean to say _yes_. “I don’t want to talk about it,” comes out instead, muffled in cloth.

That seems to be the last straw for John. Instead of the side-hug and the hair doof, he pulls you closer, with you straddling his lap so he can hold you proper, cradling your head to his chest. It’s so _nice_ , being pressed up against him like this. “I know you don’t want to, but I—this is part of it, Karkat, we’ve talked about this, I need—I need to know what’s bothering you, I _want_ to know, I—I want to take care of you, okay, and I can’t do that unless I know what I’m taking care of.”

The talking, though. The talking is the hardest part. You’d rather throw a fit and stomp away than have to go through the debrief at the back end or the delineation at the front end. If you start talking, you start using your words to wall yourself in, covering yourself in spikes so you can hurt anyone who tries to peel that away from you. It’s so much easier to do and be done.

But this isn’t about what’s easy, is it. It never has been, or you and Dave would never have let John in. “I can’t,” you spill out first, and you’re tempted to just leave it at that. You just can’t, right now. Can’t put into words why you feel like shit when that was the most mindblowing thing that’s ever happened to you. Can’t articulate how it felt to add someone else, another dom on top of the one and a half there already was, to the mélange. “I can’t safeword for you.” And that’s not at all what you mean, but it comes the closest to what the problem actually is.

Because you can’t say ‘no’ for somebody else. If John wants to cram his dick into some other troll’s nook, that’s his choice. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it. And you don’t even know why you feel the way you do, why your grubscars feel too tight around your chest cage every time you inhale, why your throat tightens up to the point where you feel like you’re going to be sick. It’s so _stupid_. You’re around John and you can’t even _breathe_ , how fucking dumb do you even want to _be_ , fuck.

You’re not crying. (Honest.) John thumbs at your face anyway, tucks his hand under your chin so he can get you to look up at him. “You can’t, no, you can’t do that,” he admits, “but what you _can_ do is tell me what I did wrong so I can _never do that again_.”

He won’t do it again. That’s a promise, coming from him, he doesn’t have to bust out paper and write it down and sign it like a contract but it’s a covenant all the same. If you tell him, if it’s bothering you this much, he just… won’t. “Won’t undo the past,” you point out instead, because you very much doubt he’ll ever have the _option_ of repeating that particular performance, and you shake his hand off your face with a shake of your head and a jut of your chin.

It just means John’s hand wraps around to the back of your neck, right where your head meets your torso column; the way he massages his fingers into the knob he finds there will always make you go a little shivery. You can’t look at him. He knows that, so he tucks you back into his chest, so close you can hear every tremor of the beat of his heart. His blood sings to you. “I can guess,” he tells you. “Because I thought I heard you say ‘that’s my job.’ When Eridan started to go after me. Is that it?”

You hate yourself so much. You bury your nose between John’s pectorals. Without nodding, you still tell him yes, in the involuntary pained whimper that comes out of your throat. You are being such a _pissgrub_ about this, what the fuck is even _wrong_ with you.

John’s hands are magic. It’s like he’s playing a tune along his fingertips that your skin can hear; your spine starts to go slack and all liquid-like. “Karkat, I know,” and he doesn’t, not fully, he doesn’t know how much this is ripping you up, “that’s our _thing_ , isn’t it?”

“Yes,” and how do you manage to sound so miserable when you actually agree with him?

“And this is pure speculation, but I think you might be a little upset right now. Just a little.” You huff out something that might have been a laugh or might have been a disgruntled harrumph at his sarcasm, if it didn’t sound so snot-wet there at the end. “Would it make you feel better if I told you he didn’t make it?”

“No,” you lie.

“Because he couldn’t—not like you do.” You twine your fingers through the hand of John’s you’re still holding down on your arm. “Not even halfway. He might have tried—and I’ll give him a gold star for it, an attempt was made, heh.” How does he have the gall to laugh. “But he couldn’t do it. Not like you. Where you’re all hot inside and taking me that deep, taking me all the way.”

His voice is soft and stuck in his throat, a possessive purr behind it. You like it when he tells you good things about you—makes you feel like a feather is being trickled over your sharkskin, a whisper of sensation ghosting along your nerves. Your pulse rises to the gentle circle he’s rubbing between your shoulderblades with his thumb. “Mmh,” comes out involuntarily, and then, as a quiet, short “ _John_.”

“What?”

“Don’t play the innocent with me, you limp-licking fucksuck.”

“Oh.” Because John is oblivious as two entire sacks of hammers sometimes. “Is this turning you on?”

You open your mouth to say an actual word. Instead, what comes out is this embarrassingly high trill, because it’s not just John’s hand where your neck meets your torso column, it’s his other hand resting on your hip, then dragging you bodily closer to him. Fuck, he still _reeks_ of human pheromones, so indiscriminately that your skin buzzes with it, but just in case you didn’t get his signaling that way, the lump in his flannel pants isn’t leaving much to the imagination where it’s crushed between your legs, he’s holding you so close. “Fuck you,” you hiss at him, which, as he should know by now, means _yes, how dare you_.

“Because I could really tell you all night how much you do for me.” A kiss to your ear. “How good you are to me.” His lips dwindling a little lower, edges of his buck teeth tracing cartilage until he finds your earlobe, sucks it into his mouth. “What I like about you.”

“Hnn,” a nonsense sound, because they’re going to come into the living room any minute, aren’t they, they’re going to see this ridiculous redpale nonsense and how absurdly flushed you are for this abomination of obtuse raw sex appeal, but when your blood is humming as it pulses through you, you don’t want this to stop.

John leans down to whisper into your ear seductively. “ _You really know how to dance_.”

The soft purr lingering subvocally in your throat turns to a full-out growl. This close, and with your fingers clawed up in his shirt like this, you can’t execute a patented double mobius fliparound turnways 360 no-scope facepalm, but you _can_ headbutt him in the shoulder with your horns and let out a groan of disappointment. Will this fuck ever _not_ meme when given the chance? And somehow everything between your legs still feels heavy and hot and vaguely present—how does he get away with this _every single fucking time?_

“Oh man, your _face_ ,” and John giggles. Not chuckles, not laughs. _Giggles_ , like a little kid at Saturday morning cartoons.

You bang your head against his shoulder a few more times for good measure. “Are you _ever_ going to be serious, ever, in your _lifetime_ , or do I somehow need to outwait you and wait until you die in some spectacularly stupid fashion so I can see in the afterlife if you still refuse to _grow the fuck up_?”

“Oh, come on, you thought it was funny.”

“Of all the things that could potentially have been the point,” you grumble into his shirt, “that particular thing was the point _the least_.”

“Besides,” and John’s voice softens, his fingertips migrating across your skin, okay god damn it he has you right back in the sex-drunk phase just from tracing your muscle groups with his fingers and it’s not fair. “I mean, that kind of is what I want to do right now.”

“Dance?”

“No, tell you what I like about you.”

“You could just—“

“When you’ll actually _listen_ ,” he insists, and well. Fine. He has a point. “So I can see what it does to you when I remind you that you’re actually one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.”

Your pusher flares messily inside of you, mood whiplash meaning that all of it whips around the spear of black he just drove into your pale heart. “Jonathan Franklin Egbert, so help me, if you are going to take this conversation any further we need to go to a respiteblock.”

“Oh man, I always forget you think this is actual dirty-talking. That is _so cool_.” No, what’s ‘cool’ is that this muscled hunk of mangrit can actually just. Stand up. From the couch, where he’s been clutching you close on his lap, keeping you in his arms and encouraging you to wrap your legs around his waist so you don’t have to move your face out of the tuck of his neck into his shoulder. You’re kind of awkwardly sitting on his forearm, but as long as he’s _carrying you_ , you don’t really care. You still can’t believe he’s strong enough to do this.

As the two of you phase out of the living space and back into more private quarters, you get a comment or two from the peanut gallery that’s finally managed to glub back to shore. “Nice koala,” Dave says.

“W-what’s wrong?” is Eridan’s slightly-stuttered question.

“Just a little overwhelmed,” John reassures them, and he’s not _wrong_ , so you’ll let him leave it at that. “We should be back by the time the boat sinks.”

As you drift back, and they drift forward, “The boat sinks?”

“Don’t worry about it, we’re not watching _Titanic_.”

“You’re watching _Titanic_ ,” John says, in that or-else tone.

Dave taunts back with “Or what?”

John doesn’t answer; he’s closing the bedroom door behind the two of you. “Or what,” you mumble at him.

“I’ll vandalize the Goggles on his webcomic landing page,” John says nonchalantly. Of course. Something irritating-but-harmless. He’s gotten a lot better at his pranking since you all were young. Nothing soul-crushing or reputation-destroying or belongings-ruining, just simple clean fun that doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings but does annoy them and simultaneously make them laugh. “All right, you, come here.”

And just like that, he’s laying you out on the mattress where the four of you just fucked and perching his body precariously over yours, hands on either side of your head so he doesn’t crush you with his weight. The air in the room is suffused with detonation hormones; the prickle of it crawls under your skin, makes you feel electric. Just having his eyes on you feels like too much. When he puts one forearm to the sleep slat and drags his other hand to your cheek, you close your eyes and shake your face out of his hand. “Don’t look at me,” and it sounds fucking pathetic but the way his gaze lingers on every part of you is too intimate for you to bear.

“Hey, okay, all right,” and a hair-whiffing sound, and a clatter, and. Oh. Oh, you _really_ did not think this through, did you. Because when you turn to look up at him again, he’s without his glasses, and. Sufferer’s Disciple. You know his vision is hazed over, soft at the edges, and that’s the way he looks at you right now, earnest and warm, unfocused but totally present, trying to take in the sight of you despite knowing he can’t. “Better?”

“Fuck,” comes out, a little choked. The other thing you failed to take into account was that, without his glasses, John relies on his hands a lot more. Like he’s trying to read some hidden Braille in your skin. He leans down, presses his lips to yours—a full mélange of red and pale poured into you from the tip of his tongue past your teeth, and you whimper and reach up to card your hands through his hair, over and over, pulling a little on the way out.

“That feels,” John says into your mouth before he slips away, licking at the jut of your jaw, “really good, Karkat, that’s. You always make me feel incredible.” Knives, knives at your ribcage, he’s telling the truth and it’s so good it hurts, to know you do this to him. “Like, around you? I finally kind of get it when Dave says that cliché stuff like I take his breath away or whatever, because. I can feel my heartbeat _everywhere_ ,” and he licks a stripe up an exposed tendon of your neck, finds a pulse point of your own, “in my chest and at my throat and in my fingers and just. _Karkat_.”

Your own breath halts, goes slightly backwards when he starts sucking a mark into your shoulder. You can feel it too, the resonance under his skin, and your own body rhythms are reaching out in kind, trying to match his. “John,” is the only thing you can think of to say that he’ll understand, because everything else would come out in some Alternian idiom and you don’t have time to explain the nuance to him when you can just say his name, like that, and know that he _knows_.

“And you’re so—intense, hah,” your hands snaking under his shirt and you’re burning up so much that his human skin almost feels cool to the touch even with an arousal flush rising to the surface. “You never half-ass _anything_ , you always throw yourself into it, and. You focus on people. And when you focus on _me_ , god, Karkat, I feel like I could _fly_. You believe in things, okay, you believe in _people_ , and knowing you believe in me? I never want to let you down.”

You don’t think he ever could. “Fuck,” comes out thick from behind your teeth, and as you’re running your fingertips up John’s back and baring his skin again, he’s snaking a hand under the waistband of your sweats, and. _Mercy_. Instead of the word, though, a quiet, sort of fluting sound comes out of your windpipe. Because—yeah. The edge is back in your excitement, your bulge creeping out incrementally, everything between your legs feeling drenched in anticipation.

He doesn’t go for the obvious squirming bait, but he rubs against it with the heel of his hand, his wrist—how do you always forget that humans have a noticeable pulse point here? Because your blood powers reach out, and touch him, and you can feel his heartbeat tick up just that little bit faster. “Jeez, you’re incredible, look at you. You feel so good,” playing with his fingertips in the slick of the folds of your nook, “and just. Your body is _perfect_ ,” vascular pushed into a transient arrhythmia at his words, a sudden seizing in your chest that leaves you feeling like he’s going to smash your quadrants to pieces, “you’re amazing, and I.”

Just playing. Just smearing those two fingertips against your entrance, teasing. “Please,” comes out with a hiss and a chirr, and you yank his shirt a little more intensely. Naked, now. Yesterday, if not sooner.

Thank fuck he understands where you’re going with this. After so long, this has become a little choreographed routine, the sudden transition from clothed to naked. While you pull his shirt over his head, he’s dragging your pants down your legs; by the time he’s peeling the shirt down his arms and flinging it away, you’re kicking off your sweats and working on his flannels. It works. Somehow. Because fifteen seconds later, you have a very naked John Egbert between your legs looking at you like you’re the one who went godtier, with that fuzziness of myopia that means he can’t see you as anything else.

“God,” he says softly, sounding more than a little overwhelmed himself, and you yank him back down onto you by pulling one of his hands into your own and anchoring it right above you, right between your horns. John’s fingers knot into yours tightly, perfectly, after so long. His forehead rests against yours, even as his fingers rehome themselves at your parts again, and it’s so intimate you can’t catch your breath. “Sometimes—shit, Karkat, sometimes I want to just crawl inside you and stay there forever. Like I need to curl up right between your—your lungs, your atmosphere aspirators, right around your heart, so you can hold me there and—and—and I’ll be safe.”

His fingers finally find center, start drilling home. You open your legs for him; your nook drools around him. He doesn’t have to do this part, but he does it anyway, both because it’s easier for you to walk afterwards and because it jacks with your head, a hint at sensation to come but not quite enough to take off the edge in the meantime. He seats his fingers, stills, and you hitch your hips against him—his bulge is heavy and hard where it lays across your stomach and your own starts to loop around it. “Don’t stop, fuck,” if he stops now you might actually cry. If he keeps going, you _know_ you’re going to. Just like you know, in some primal part of you, that getting it all out like this is exactly what you need.

John is right there on your wavelength with you, body thrumming at the same frequency. Pulls out his fingers, twists on the way down, plunges in again, and oh. Right there, that thin part of you where the point of your bulge resides—he pulls out, thrusts back in, hits it square, and you see stars. “I can’t believe,” John’s still murmuring to you from somewhere far away, voice anchoring you even as you spin out into a thousand million pieces, “I get to see you like this, Karkat, you’re gorgeous, you’re just so—responsive, wow,” at a particular undulation that runs down your entire spine as you try to ride his fingers and find your own rhythm. “I just can’t believe you show me this side of you, and I never, _ever_ want to take this for granted, so every time it feels raw and new and it’s just a privilege, okay, I’m the luckiest guy on the planet.”

To hear John say it that way, when that’s exactly how you feel about him, is what makes you squinch your eyes shut. Your eyes are—they’re just _wet_ , okay, they get like this, every part of you feels like it’s leaking right now with how turned on you are, but… Fine. You’re crying. This is the best part, though. “No, me,” you insist, because holy fucking shit, it’s not just John. It’s Dave, and maybe even Eridan now, and these people look at you like they care about you and you matter to them and you belong here. You belong to John— _with_ John, and it’s still so hard to wrap your head around it sometimes, you who thought you could never know someone else’s touch because to be yourself was to be a walking sin, and here you are. With John’s fingers in you. Knowing you’re a heretic born and bred, knowing you’re a freak and a mutant.

“Tell me,” John says, a little breathless, and you open your eyes. “Tell me when,” and his fingers drag along the sensitive lining of your nook and you spill out just that little bit more pre for him. Dig into the best of the squish of it, manipulate you until you’re shaking with how much you need him.

It’s still not enough. “Now,” you tell him. “In me— _now_ , fuck.”

“Same,” John says, the honest, ardent dork that he is, and pulls out. Drags the slick of his hand against your front taint and you seize, up your bulge to untangle it from his and once he’s extricated he guides the head of his dick through your nook ripples. Oh, holy fuck, sudden bead of precum introduced to your system and you’re already fizzling all over, your body profile is so synched to his by now that it sends a message to your brain that can’t quite be translated, like you’ve fallen out of a dream into your own body and you’re ready to live in it and get pailed to within an inch of your sanity.

He sinks in—slow, smooth, measured—and his forehead slips away from yours, because he has to bury his mouth at your throat to smother the groan that rises from the core of him. Inch by inch he pushes into you, and you take it. Like you were made to do it, like you were made to wrap around him. _All_ of him, not half, not part, _all_ , and you dig your claws into the back of his hand and paw through his hair looking for a horn to hold onto as his hips lock into yours.

Yes. Right there. All the way. Fuck. He’s fucking huge, like his blood color would match his eyes, and all of it is _in you_. Filling you to the brim with him, pushing against every part of your nook, pre seeping out of him and trickling along your nook lining until your own premat responds in kind and slicks him up impossibly further.

He doesn’t move. Good. He can stay right there for now, completely enveloped. You bring your thighs up so you can cross your ankles behind the small of his back and John makes this quiet, low, desperate noise, followed by a “fuckyoufeelsogood” muffled into your collarbone, as your entire body shifts around him.

“Yeah,” you tell him, “fuck, you’re. Mm. A lot.” Incoherent, but so is he, and even though neither of you are really speaking English right now you’re still communicating, in the pulse that runs along his cock that you can feel in you, in the surprised huff of his breath across your skin when you clench your nook in a rippled wave down the length of him.

“Can we just,” he says quietly. Tries to shift his hips, manages a wiggle, then reseats himself. “I need a minute, it’s.”

And you breathe. Slowly as you can. Both of you locked together, chests jostling. His thumbprint runs across your knuckle. You can feel his eyelashes at your throat. “Come on,” you try to encourage him, because. You need _movement_. You need him to thrash, biologically speaking, but he can’t. Doesn’t matter. The smooth piston into and out of you, all ten inches of it, is more than enough to get you there.

An inch he draws back, and then crams himself right back into you. “God,” and his voice cracks. “I just want to stay in you like this, how are you even doing this, I can’t—no one’s ever—“

Oh, fuck. That. What you need to hear, what he needs to say. “No one?”

“No one else can— _fuck_ ,” as he pulls out a little further this time, thrusts in again just as effortlessly. “You’re the only one who can take me like this, and that’s—but you do it because you _want it_ like that and— _Karkat_ ,” like that’s the only word that makes sense to him anymore. “I can’t do this with anyone else and you’re so hot and wet and nnh!”

The sound a frustrated Egbert makes when you flutter your nook around him again. “Our thing,” you tell him, trying not to slip into Alternian when you do because you are spinning out of your pan right now with how full you are of sex. “Ours. Nobody else’s.”

“Ours,” he repeats, and thrusts into you smooth and slow again. “You and me. You’re amazing, how do you even _do_ this, I can’t,” picking up a rhythm, an almost-circular motion with his hips as he crashes into you, “it feels like you go on forever.”

“Mm _mm_ right there again,” you tell him urgently, a trill behind your teeth, as the heavy ridge of him rubs right against the thin wall of your interior bulgepoint.

“There?” He does it again and you keen, throwing your head back and not caring who hears you. “Oh, shit, I could _feel_ that, oh my god,” and again, and _again_ , and you might actually be seeing constellations behind your eyelids with how fucking good this is.

 You tip your hips up for him and it gets him an even better angle, one that drags him deliciously against the structure of your backwall. You can’t hold it like that for long, but John gets the idea, putting his weight on his hand in yours and wrapping his other arm around your lower back so you can keep it _rightthereyes_. “Don’t stop,” you beg, “fuck, don’t stop, don’t stop _talking_.” Because maybe you picked this up from Dave can’t-shut-the-fuck-up Strider, but holy shit, hearing other people’s voices gets you off.

And John—John is a filthy fucking pervert, because even as he’s fucking the deepest of red into you, he’s spilling pale into your ear, and it makes your chest twist in on itself even as your nook seizes around him. “You said you made the stars for me,” he says, hot and tight even as he keeps moving in you so smoothly. “God, when I’m in you like this it feels like it, it’s _you_ , Karkat. You are the star. Like we’re in our own galaxy and it’s just us. Me and you. This. You’re the only thing that even makes sense right now, like I need to be inside you, I _need_ to make love to you—”

There go the waterworks. Quietly. A silent emotional orgasm of catharsis that makes the anxious-wet finally leave your eyes as tear tracks down your face, with only a harsh, broken “ _a-ah_ ” to signal they started. And it’s just then when John pulls your hips to his, rears back and takes you with him until his knees are between your back and the mattress, and leans back over you to start kissing at you again.

He rocks into you deep and steady and sure, testing the boundaries of your body with his over and over until he’s sure you can hold him, until you can convince him that you’ll never let him go. His kisses are sugar-pale when the hold of him is red as sin and this is your quadrant-blurring freak and you’ve never loved him quite like you love him in this moment, with his heart flayed open for you and his words honest in your ears and every movement of him against you, into you joining you more completely than you thought possible.

It’s too much, the emotions of it and the hormones coursing through you and John, always John, in you and over you and kissing you but more often than not smashing his nose to yours and just trying to remember how to breathe, blood singing through you and harmonizing with John to create this symphony of near-synesthesia with the sensations crawling in an elegant frisson along every tender part of you, inside and out, mind, body, and soul.

John can tell. That you’re almost there. “Close?”

“Yes,” you can taste it behind your teeth, close enough to touch but not enough to claim.

“Can you—again—if I—”

“I—” Actually, you don’t know. The only experience you’ve had with something like that have been when John fingers his filth out of you when he’s finished, and it feels good but it feels like after, something final. But with the way John’s looking at you, and filling you, and thrusting into you? “I want to.”

“Then come for me,” and his next few thrusts draw him nearly away entirely, then just as smoothly and swiftly crammed back into you like he never left at all.

Oh, fuck. It cascades over you, wiping your brain first and systematically going through and destroying all your systems—skin searing, spine blitzed, heart too big for its bone cage, nubs and prongs totally numb, a shout of victory bursting from you as your bulge jets between the two of you and your nook lining locks John in place, as deep as he can go.

Locks being figurative. He can still move. In increments, short hitches, changing the angle more than the penetration but oh holy Dolorosa, Sufferer’s mother, you start getting pins and needles back in your hands and feet and John. John, this man-mountain of complete doofus, pulls your chest bodily off the bed and hauls you upright into his lap so he can hold you, wrap his arms around you, and obstinately fuck into you as much as your nook will allow, “oh my god, Karkat, oh my god, I’m—“

He doesn’t have to say it. His genetic material spills into you as he pulls you down onto him, and that’s what starts the entire deluge again, this time from your nook, oh. Oh, _fuck_ , you’re tasting colors. John’s deep blue words, endlessly poured into your ear hot and earnest, tuck under your tongue like the sugar-coated bite of a true-gold caegar as you clench and gush around him, prompted by little more than his xenomat.

He goes on forever. It goes on forever. You’re still twitching under your skin when he lays you back down, still nestled inside you. He braces, holds his chest away from yours, nonono. No, you don’t want him to pull out, you want him to stay just where he is. Just where he belongs. In you, all in, the way only you can hold him. You drag him back down with your hand at the back of his neck and he collapses onto you, arms around you, breath coming in stops and starts just like your pulse is jumping erratic in you. And the only thing you can think to say is, “Did you mean it?”

“Karkat,” and he’s so hoarse it makes you want to force water down his throat and you were not prepared for the spike of pale that would flare along your frazzled nerves but wow was that ever a pleasant aftershock. “I meant it. How could I not? You—you short angry little alien goober—you just. Make me so happy. And I know I don’t tell you enough, how much you mean to me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t mean it when I finally say it. I meant everything.” Slower, deeper breaths. More measured speech. “I don’t think _mean_ is a word anymore.”

“I just.” You sound so insecure. “Needed to know.”

“I know. And I should tell you more often, because I never want you trapped up here,” running a hand through your hair and finding a horn so he can grab it, muffle you in the pleasant buzz that comes with hornplay, “and thinking like you don’t deserve this. Or like you can’t tell me if you’re upset.”

Softens, gradually, and your nook lining stops clinging to him so tightly. Material dribbles out of you hot and fast as he withdraws. “I’m disgusting,” you mutter to yourself. You need a shower or five.

“You’re not,” John says.

“I’m covered in human juice, Egbert.”

“Oh.”

“And you look like you had an industrial accident near your reproductive organs.”

He looks down and immediately winces. “Yeah, that’s kinda gross. But—Karkat, don’t. Okay, so you’re kind of swimming in jizz, and I’m going to dump you in the bath because you kind of reek so hard like well-screwed troll that even I can smell it. But if you call yourself disgusting one more time—”

“What. What are you going to do about it.” A threat, along with a nostril-flare, slight-fang-glint display.

“I am going to do this, all over again, but even better next time.” You’re pretty sure the smooth baritone of his voice, and the heated way he’s staring at you, just got the Mother Grub gravid. Cross-species. Across the galaxy. _In an alternate universe_.

John idly smooshes kisses into your hair. Muscle by muscle, your body unclenches itself, until—okay. Yeah. That’s going to be radiating _I just got fucked so hard I can’t help my manspreading_ in the morning, isn’t it. It feels so good to be so sore. There’s just one thing that’s still bothering you. “And you won’t—you won’t. Do that with another troll.”

“Now that I know it bothers you? Nope.” You doodle in his chest hair. _Mammals_. They’re so absurd. “Why? Do you want Eridan in this?”

“No!” Then, once your absurd jealously subsides and makes you feel less like throwing up, “Yes. Maybe? I don’t know.”

“I’m not sure either. Eridan’s great, but he’s…” Paused in thought. His chin lands in your hair and it’s sharp against your skull when he speaks again. “Eridan is a sometimes food. Not for permanent, but I’m not kicking him out. I don’t know if that makes sense. He’s just… he doesn’t have the experience yet. Maybe, I guess, is what I’m trying to say.”

You feel guilty that you’re so unguarded right now that John can probably feel the relief flood through you as your body goes slack in his arms. “Shower,” you insist to cover it up, and attempt to use that muscle momentum to roll out of bed—mm, yeah, definitely, your core is nothing but a Lonely Island song right now.

You have to bat his hands away from you while you’re in there—your horns are ultra-sensitive right now, and this grubbrains thinks he can just fondle them like they’re rumble spheres whenever he wants. Still, you manage to economize and save some water, even if John blocks most of the spray when he stands under it.

There’s plenty of it to be had in the living room, given that the other two followed through on their promise and the HMS is sinking on the screen. Usually you cry at this part, because after watching a great romance like Jack’s with Rose, and to see them lose each other, you feel like you got punched in the feelings. But Eridan? Eridan is laughing like you’ve never seen him laugh before, great big ugly snorts and doubled over and banging his fist on the coffee table. If he hollers any louder he’ll have to roll around on the floor clutching his sides to contain his mirth.

Well, if he’s this entertained by nautical misadventures, you’ll let him keep that. Begrudgingly. You kick him in the shin and bypass him for Dave, who hands you a… bowl of popcorn? He hates this stuff, says the kernels stick in his teeth. You put a fluff bite in your mouth and it melts, perfectly buttery-salty and warm. “Thanks,” you tell him, too contented-exhausted to self-censor your gratitude.

“Holy shit.” Dave slides his shades down, peers at you from over the rims. “That good, huh?”

“That good,” John confirms, and takes the last cushion on the couch.

It works. You sit like a grubschooler, legs crossed and feet under your knees, with your popcorn in your lap, and munch it while you watch Eridan’s reactions. He’s honestly more entertaining than the film you’ve seen at least ten times. Yeah, maybe. You can definitely see it. Maybe Eridan could be a sometimes sort of person in this awkward geometry shape. And now that you debriefed after this round, you’re starting to look forward to seeing what makes him tick.

**Author's Note:**

> [about the author](http://2x2verse.tumblr.com/abouttheauthor)


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